ShadowFox, it'll definitely depend on where you're fighting. Insides battles are rarely going to hit (pistol and machine pistol) medium range. And even in the streets, it's unlikely to hit the same weapon's long range. Unless somebody sets up other situations.

Lockepick, here's the list that I have. If you submit a sheet soon-ish, you'll probably be one of the last ones up for consideration. In fact, I'm going to go back and look over the sheets one more time to see if I missed anything. So expect an edit some times soon-ish that'll have those suggestions and/or corrections.

Have Sheets:

Muse: Tanoshimi - Mage, combat spells and a sweet blade

No corrections on your end. My advice (get a Boost Str spell and then a sustaining focus so that your sword isn't a slightly worse light pistol) still stands. And though you don't have any alchemy, as a full mage I'm going to do something that the book should have, but didn't. Ideas for places that you can get the better reagent finding rate: any Shinto shrine, old forests, antique stores. Oh, and name the other contacts if you don't want me to decide the name. And the Professor's Specialty.

Ampre: Eir - Unarmed Adept, deadly punch, healing hug

Major thing is to save up for a fake SIN and Licenses. I'm also assuming that a lot of the spares are for throwing, and that you're going to eventually do something to boost the throwing that you do. Like, get Boost Str and the Hard Target power that gives you extra Str for the purposes of range. Any reason for the taser, by the way? Because it's a bit redundant.

HopeFox: Magellan - Technomancer, Fights with a Crew, Like a Boss

You'll probably want to drop the gunnery, unless you want to get the other half of the smart system. And even if you did get it, the drone's a bit better as a drone than being directly controlled. Good chance of taking two passes, aim and burst fire for a ten die attack and -2 to dodge it, or aim and full auto for a nine die attack and -5 to dodge it. Complex full auto should be only done if you get two passes, one just aim, and one to fire. Only seven dice to hit, but the other guy loses nine dice on their dodge roll. Those are all before an application of a Machine Sprite's Diagnostics, though.

Oh, and you can probably drop the Laser Sight. The Raiden has a built-in smartlink, so the Laser Sight's pretty redundant.

TheGlyphstone: Bubble Boy - Rigger, Fights with a Crew, Like a Hoss

You may consider moving stats around a little to boost your gunnery pool (modified) by a point or two. Go from your jumped in drone (any drone) being good to being a combat specialist. And your RCC has a built in sim-module, so you don't need to have it in your commlink too, unless you just wanted it there too.

ShadowFox: Green Peace - Adept, Magic for fighting, Meta for Social

Assuming that you're taking the full six points of magic, your edge should be two. You have twelve knowledge points, leave your native language at 0 and Chummer will register it as N. See the above conversation about machine pistols, adept powers, and skills. Don't forget to fill in the capacity of your glasses.

One possibility for combat is take some out of Longarms out and just aim when you need to fire at a distant target, trade Pistols for Automatics (take at least one out of the skill and into a specialty for your chosen automatic). With your magic + attribute boost, you'll get on average three hits, so keep that in mind if you do some skill shuffling.

And with your automatic, aim (take the extra die) + a simple burst as your standard combat turn. Assuming Automatics 3 and specialty, an average boost roll will give you 17 dice, which basically makes you a combat specialist with that automatic. Long arms 1 and specialty, average boost, aim and you get 12 dice, which is still a good combat pool. Slightly less good if you can't do a burst as a simple action because of your gun it'll just take multiple passes, which you are going to get, period.

Hexed: Glimmer - Any light you see may be an Illusion spell

First and foremost, unless you plan on being a habitual Edge Burner, buy up a second point of Edge ASAP. It's super-useful. Don't forget your knowledge skills, take at least one language, it's always useful. And your plan of using Shapeshift is probably the best reason to take Focused Concentration at that high a level. Don't forget that you can use reagents to change the limit of a spell being cast.

Speaking of reagents, here's my thought for what the book left out. You get the better rate for harvesting reagents if you look in a place where there's been large groups of people experiencing strong emotions. If a place has had large changes in aspect, you get the better rate despite the difficulties as you leverage the chaos of the change.

Took some of the advice and went for pure Magician instead of Mystic Adept. And then I couldn't scrape up enough points to get the Troll Magician working so I went elf. Should be mostly done provided CHummer doesn't offer any more fits. As a side note evidently a corrupted gear chart or something in Chummer leads to some pretty strange things.

Bioware's evidently expensive so the selection's kinda... slim Depending on gear I probably will slip in a pain editor or something similar. The spell selection's sort of a grab bag but hopefully will cover a fair bit of things. Will be packing grenades to go with the fling spell.

The sleep regulator is a great choice! A pain editor will be great if you can afford it, but it is pricey. Another bit of cheap bioware you might consider is symbiotes - they add their rating to your Healing rolls, which will help you recover from drain more quickly.

Focused Concentration is good, but it still only lets you sustain one spell without penalty. Have you considered taking pharmaceutical grade Psyche? Not only does it give you +1 Intuition and Logic and Mental Limit, but it halves the penalty for sustaining spells, so you'd only take -1 for sustaining one spell, and -2 for two spells. And it's hardly addictive at all!

Focused Cocnentration seems overrated sometimes, compared to a much cheaper sustaining focus. Seeing as how it looks like you're using it to have multiple spells gong in combat instead of for buffing, it's probably a good plan. :)

@Hopefox. I'd not thought about the Symbiotes. And I don't think they fall under prototype transhuman but if they've no essence loss I might have to poke that section again. As for the drug... I tend to skip those so hadn't even realized something like that existed. I'll certainly have to give them a poke to see what can be found. Thanks!

@Muse Chaos Mage is the tradition as off all the one's I've seen its had the most draw for me. I tried to keep the Tradition and Mentor Spirit in mind while choosing spells. As well as a few other pieces. To be honest I've not looked at the focus yet but having Focused Concentration does mean I won't be troubled by losing a focus. And Shapechange has an effect of dumping all your gear so potentially keeping focuses on hand might be difficult at times.

As for Invisiblity... That does sound like a good idea as I seem to have remembered what they did wrong.

Good points re. Eir's gear: I'd originally planned to have Arnis de Mano as her martial art (hence paired weapons) but that's pretty redundant now. The taser was supposed to give her a non-lethal ranged attack I take the point - will see if I can shuffle around enough newyen to buy even a rating one fake SIN.

Regarding my stats, how would you suggest I re-allocate them? I honestly cannot figure out what my Gunnery pool is going to be jumped-in; I thought it was Logic+Gunnery, but the book seems to think it's either Logic+Gunnery or Agility+Gunnery, or possibly Sensors+Gunnery, or maybe Agility+Gunnery with a Limit of Sensors, or Accuracy...no one online can agree either, the 'right answer' is all over the place.

If you can tell me what pools, in your game, I'll be doing for various drone actions while hot-simming, because the core book is repeatedly self-contradictory on this, I can switch stats around to match.

You'll probably want to drop the gunnery, unless you want to get the other half of the smart system. And even if you did get it, the drone's a bit better as a drone than being directly controlled. Good chance of taking two passes, aim and burst fire for a ten die attack and -2 to dodge it, or aim and full auto for a nine die attack and -5 to dodge it. Complex full auto should be only done if you get two passes, one just aim, and one to fire. Only seven dice to hit, but the other guy loses nine dice on their dodge roll. Those are all before an application of a Machine Sprite's Diagnostics, though.

Oh, and you can probably drop the Laser Sight. The Raiden has a built-in smartlink, so the Laser Sight's pretty redundant.

My understanding was that if I set up the Smart Firing Platform and then control it wirelessly through AR or VR, I use Gunnery + Logic to attack, which would give me a pool of 15, better than its Targeting + Pilot of 9. The Combat section in pp. 183-184 of SR5 say to use Logic, although other parts of the book say to use Agility. There are arguments for either, but I feel Logic makes more sense. If it's Agility, then yes, I'll relax the Gunnery a bit and buy some more Automatics, probably. EDIT: Heh, I see Glyph has the same problem. Yeah, it's pp. 183-184 that say Logic. Sensors only gets involved when you're using Sensor-Assisted Gunnery, which means you use the sensors to lock onto a target. There's Passive Targeting, where you just use the Sensors as a limit instead of Accuracy (only really useful if you've got great sensors and a lousy weapon), and Active Targeting, where you use your sensors for a sort of super-powered Take Aim action.

The laser sight is because I don't want to get an implanted smartlink, and a smartlink in glasses only provides +1 die, so it's not really better than a laser sight. Putting a smartlink in glasses is surprisingly expensive, too, and uses up a lot of Capacity and Availability, so I figured the laser sight was easier. Also, wirelessly controlling a smart firing platform only gets you the smartlink bonus if the smartlink is implanted.

The Yamaha Raiden comes with 1 point of inbuilt recoil compensation, so together with the 5 from the platform, it won't have a penalty for a single six-round FA burst.

Other questions I had:

If I compile a Fault sprite and instruct it to defend me, and a hostile decker shows up and starts trying to fry my brain, and my Fault sprite uses a Data Spike on the decker, does that break my Like a Boss code of honour? Obviously I'm not going to use my sprites as assassins, because that's Not Like a Boss, but can they do damage when defending me (or themselves)? If not, then I'll avoid using Fault sprites, since they're the only ones with Cybercombat anyway.

On the subject of sprites, is it reasonable to say that I'll have some time before the Big Mission to register some sprites? Going solo into the Matrix is scary...

Funnily enough, I was more referring to how the drone has two passes on anything buy a roll of four 1s, where as in the flesh you have about even odds at it. And of course, to get the best matrix init you would be helpless in the flesh-world. Although on a second pass, I think I may have conflated the form of the smart platform and the gyromount. (Also thanks for the pages. It'll be Logic, but I wanted to know because something about my copy is fucked, and even the page numbers in the book don't always refer to the right pages. Before about 380, it's kinda iffy.)

Now as for the Fault Sprite. That one's tricky, so I'll try to not contradict myself like the book does. I hope I succeed, because I'm using a lot less space and time. In short, if you use the more task hungry method of giving it commands (Three tasks for three turns of defense instead of one task for a full combat + powers used in that combat) it won't break the code because it's theoretically also doing things like Erase Matrix Signature, Erase Marks, and Matrix Perception. Similarly, if you gave it away to a different persona (even one not capable of attack actions), and they use a task straight up for a combat, that doesn't count.

Using one task for combat (and in the case of the Fault Sprite one task for a power) will break your code, unless you specifically order it to not data spike and something causes it to do so anyway.

As for pre-Big Mission stuff, yes and no. Officially you guys are given one time that it's supposed to start, and you're just in transit early. Unofficially, it was going to be cut short and you were all supposed to die in transit accidents that wound up crashing into the target building. In actuality, that itself goes wrong and you guys are there at a different time, survive the accident and it takes out the guys that were supposed to be guaranteed to ensure the death of all the runners. So everyone will have a bit of time to do things, and everyone gets to get out of those accidents clean and free as part of the run of good luck (for you guys).

It's true that the platform will get more actions than I do in AR, so I may leave it to its own devices sometimes. But it's still more effective than me trying to aim the thing with my clumsy meat hands. :)

I think I'll just keep one Fault Sprite on hand that I can lend to other people, then, and not use Fault Sprites otherwise. That works. Against deckers I'll mostly aim for using Crack Sprites to Format and Reboot their decks. Not sure how I'll handle enemy technomancers or IC, other than hiding from them. I'll probably just hide from them, actually, I'm very good at that.

Okay, sounds good! Once we get started, let us know how much time we have and we'll register sprites, bind spirits, mix potions, take drugs, and do whatever else it is we do before missions. :)

They're also pretty good at Erase Matrix Signature, as long as it has at least half your Resonance in level.

But this does remind me, you may consider getting or plain switching a power out for Resonance Veil. It's probably the second strongest Resonance power after the very well costed Puppeteer.

That's probably a good idea, yeah. I think I'll swap Static Bomb for Resonance Veil, and shuffle some skills around so that my Electronic Warfare is high enough to make the Hide action easier. Now that I've seen Alvin's sheet, I won't bother with the Engineering skills, since he can handle that stuff just fine.

With the extra money from ditching the mechanics' tools, I've bought a bottle of altskin (+1 armor for 24 hours, single use) and some supplies for my Savior Medkit. Sheet updated.

@RSGALex: Thank you for the update! I didn't realize there was still 6 interested parties. I'm going withdraw interest -- seems like all the available 'niches' are already filled up with six characters. I wish everybody the best of luck!

So what should I do to adjust my stats? I can't start with more than one stat at the maximum, and I chose Reaction for that at 6. Logic is my second-highest stat at 5, and I've got Gunnery maxed-out for creation at 6 too, with a Ballistics specialty. I'm not sure it can get any better than that for now.

And as regards to the hot-sim on my comlink, that is there strictly as a backup. I'll be using my RCC most of the time, but in a critical emergency, I want a second option.